HPE conferences bring together advisory board members, research grantees, and other scholars to share their findings about how neoliberalism perpetuates itself in and out of government and discuss how those insights might apply to projects of counter-hegemony. Our conferences are particularly attentive to the multi-directional traffic of people, ideas, and practices beyond U.S. borders. Conferences we have organized and co-organized include:

• The History and Political Economy Project, Exploratory Workshop Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, May 2022.

• The Many Births and Foretold Deaths of Neoliberalism Grantees Conference, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, December 2022.

• Post-Neoliberal Transformations: Politics, Practices and Governance in a Changing International Political Economy Research Conference, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Annual Meeting, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2023.

• Resource Conflicts Grantees Conference, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, December 2023.

• The New International Economic Order: Lessons and Legacies 50 Years Later Research Conference, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy, May 2024.

• Neoliberalism’s Citadels and Chokepoints Grantees Conference, Boston University, Boston MA, December 2024.

• Neoliberalism and the Capitalists Co-sponsored Research Conference, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, May 2025.

Funding opportunities for dissertation research, dissertation completion, and postdoctoral study are becoming ever more scarce just as universities seek to push graduate students out in ever fewer years, which has negative implications for the kinds of research that can be undertaken. HPE will provide small grants to graduate and early career researchers that will facilitate in-depth research on History and Political Economy topics.

For descriptions of all of our grantees’ projects, see the Grantees page.

Current and past calls for applications can be found on the Grants CFP page.

A surprisingly underutilized resource are scholarly works being written in languages other than English. In every historical field there are numerous books, either old or recent, that would help reframe the discussion of a particular topic or theme, from the governance of international finance to specific histories of regional thought collectives or projects of extraction and resistance. HPE funds the translation into English of works in other languages that will propel our collective research forward. To date, we have contracted the translation of three works, to be published in English with Verso Books.

In addition, we have a pool of funds pay for open access fees for relevant new and/or currently published pieces. With input from the our advisory board, we seek to identify relevant scholarship and support open-access publishing so that scholarly work reaches a broader audience.

Finally, we solicit and edit pieces for popular publications, including our own blog.

Our Histories and Futures of Global Governance Initiative, supported by the Open Society Foundation Education & Ideas Collaborative, brings together historians, policymakers, reform advocates, and others to address why and how history matters for global governance reform efforts.

In partnership with Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, we are organizing a series of webinars during the spring of 2025.

• Can Institutional Reforms Be Made Meaningful? Adriana Abdenur, Richard Kozul-Wright, Jamie Martin, and Quinn Slobodian in conversation, February 21, 2024.

HPE supports a one-year graduate fellowship for an advanced PhD student working on a topic related to the project’s goals. Our first graduate fellow is Conrad Jacober, PhD candidate in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. For more information, see the people page.

A key goal of the History and Political Economy Project is to make the lessons of historical scholarship on how neoliberalism has been developed, implemented, and contested around the world available and relevant to audiences beyond the academy. The HPE Project Postdoctoral Fellow supports our existing work and is responsible for carrying out a public engagement plan that allos us to disseminate the important historical research being done within our network to broader audiences. Find more information here.

Our first postdoctoral fellow is Andrew Anasasti, a historical sociologist who holds a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center. Find more information on our People page.